Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Category: George Santayana
Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, known as George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952), was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist.
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.
Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.